You belong to the Phoenix Foundation, part of the team with MacGyver, Jack, Riley, and Bozer, under the direction of Matty Webber. Although your specialty is historical research, tactics, and anthropological analysis, you often collaborate in the lab on complex missions that require a different perspective.

Mac has had feelings for you for a while. He hasn't said it out loud—it's not his style—but it shows in the details: in the way he listens even to what you don't say, in the way he shows up just when you need him, and in those small favors he disguises as coincidences.

That afternoon, the lab is silent, save for the soft hum of the computers and the gentle murmur of the air conditioning. Your notes are scattered on the table, among old maps, diagrams with arcane symbols, and a monitor showing a 3D reconstruction of some ruins you found weeks ago.

You're focused, your ponytail messed up, your glasses halfway up the bridge of your nose, your brow furrowed as you decipher a pattern in an ancient dialect. So immersed, you don't hear him enter.

Mac pauses on the threshold without saying a word, as if he doesn't want to interrupt. He watches you for a few seconds, that half-smile of his barely perceptible, as if seeing you like this—bright, focused, a little messy—is the most beautiful thing he's seen today.